Friday, January 6, 2012

Sweeping the Decks

Sherwood Forest, 2011

This is the time of the year when I go through last year’s files and create a clean slate for this year’s work.

Preparing the “day job” business files for the new year is the easy part. It’s the unresolved photographs that are the hassle. There are hundreds of them, bunches from just about every day I went out shooting. Looking through them is like walking back through the year, from a snowy January day at Virginia Beach to a sunny August afternoon at Venice Beach, California.From stylish New Yorkers strolling down Fifth Avenue to old white men in Shriner sequins brandishing scimitars as they parade down Atlantic Avenue. From Louis Kahn’s elegant Salk Institute in La Jolla, the avant-garde architecture ofEric Owen Moss at the Hayden Tract and elegant store windows in New York and Washington to humble country churches and work sheds in rural Virginia.

I don’t get sentimental about these pictures. But just the same it’s time to sweep the decks clear of last year’s work and start looking ahead to what I can see through the lens of 2012. Let’s take a few last looks at last year.